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As part of the research I do for the LD Podcast, a podcast about learning and learning disabilities, I have set up little “Google alerts” that let me know when people are talking about certain subjects on the web. News feeds, blog posts and more show up in my inbox every morning, letting me know what’s new and exciting. (This is a fantastic, free service, so give it a try for your most searched-for terms!)

What I am learning through this service, is that people use certain terms, like learning disabilities, to means different things. For example, in the UK, people with learning disabilities means people with disorders like Down Syndrome as well as those with more mild conditions like ADHD and Dyslexia. In the US, however, people with more severe disabilities like Down or lower-functioning autism spectrum disorders are given labels like “developmental delays” or “developmental disorders” and the term “learning disabilities” refers to less severe issues impacting learning, like Asperger’s, ADHD, and Dyslexia, among other issues.

The fact that the vocabulary is muddy means that when you do searches on the web, you have to be careful to note where your information is coming from in order to figure out what th site’s talking about.

Likewise, some parents of kids with learning disabilities prefer the term “learning difference” because it’s not as if their child can’t learn, they learn perhaps better aurally, or with hands on stuff than in the traditional rote way. While this is very true and an accurate description of what’s going on, we don’t give services and much needed help to people who have stylistic differences- we give help to people who have disabilities.

So in order to get help for a child who is struggling in school, parents have to come around to accepting the word “disability” as part of a child’s diagnosis. This process of “labeling” keeps a lot of parents away from having their children tested and evaluated, for fear they will be pigeon holed or somehow seen as “less” if they carry a label of LD. Yet the keys to the kingdom of accommodations as benign as longer time on tests if needed, occupational therapy for bad handwriting, extra help in reading, and the like have a price tag of testing and accepting a label.

One educator once told me this was the hardest barrier for most parents to cross, even though the label of ADHD or dyslexia was much better, made much more sense, and cleared up so many more problems than the alternative labels children and their peers use instead- “stupid” “dumb” “no -good-at school” “moron”, etc.

Give me a label of dyslexia and the ability to explain to a child their strengths and weaknesses any day of the week rather than try to overcome the damaged self-esteem and defeatist attitude that comes with a “I’m just dumb at school, and I’ll never do any better” attitude.

I hate the fact that there are people walking around whose entire self-worth has been eroded by a semantic argument about whether a label was damaging or not. Like the argument of a glass being half-full or half-empty, in the end, the engineer’s perspective of “the glass is twice as big as it needs to be” is closer to the truth: semantics don’t change the fact that there’s a real problem, a neurologically based difference at work, and we can decide to acknowledge it, or ignore it.

But with that choice comes very real consequences that your child will live with for a lifetime.

by Whitney Hoffman

[tags]kids, children, parents, parenting, Down Syndrome, Asperger’s syndrome, ADHD, education, vocabulary, autism, dyslexia, labels, barriers, bridges[/tags]
Photo graciously provided by karenwithak, through a Creative Commons license, some rights reserved